Make It Through the Wintertime
by Assimbya
Summary: Based on Hadestown. The river Lethe is Persephone's creation. Written for Yuletide 2016.


The river runs around her husband's kingdom, encircling it like a moat, quick-flowing, inexorable. The Styx feeds his mills, sets their wheels turning. The Styx tempers his steel, glowing coal-red, rust-orange, nature turned to something it is not, turned to the purpose of industry, turned to the pitiless exercise of his will. The Styx is his, obeys him like the beating of his heart. Every autumn, as Persephone takes her long, steam-powered katabasis, she passes over that river, hearing it rush beneath her, under the clattering and whistle of the train. (Tracks spiked razor-sharp, deterring those who cannot slip a coin out from beneath their tongues, cannot pay the fare.)

She hates that river sometimes. Unnatural as barbed wire, hot as a blacksmith's breath.

The other river is her own.

When first he carried her across his threshold, when first she sat upon her dark-gleaming throne, Persephone had no solace to offer the souls Hades set to work in his factories and mines. They looked to her for it already as if, because she was a woman, because she had a smile like sunlight and hair that curled soft as moss, she would grant them something her husband could not. She was young, hardly answering yet to her name, teeth chipped from her husband's jeweled pomegranates, and she chafed at their expectations, resented being asked for something she could not give even to herself. Beneath the earth, everything felt inverted - the waters boiled and the sky blazed with darkness, and Persephone, harvest's daughter, had lost the roots beneath her feet. "There is nothing I can do for you," she told them. But still they prayed to her, as though there was.

It was a heady summer night when her Dionysus finally offered her the fruit of the vine, and Persephone had her succor. He was a young god, younger even than she who they had once called simply 'Girl.' Dionysus danced in jazz clubs with bare feet. Dionysus lived among mortals, slept in their beds, ate their food, walked beside them. Dionysus took Persephone by the hand, drew her into a room full of smoke, and put a cool glass in her hand. "Sister," he said, "I think you could use a drink."

Persephone drank and danced and kissed mortals, and when the night was done the taste of pomegranate and rust had almost been washed from her tongue.

When she noticed the leaves beginning to brown she cornered Dionysus and asked for his secret. He asked a price, as gods always do. This one was almost too great. This one was a mortal's freedom.

"Semele," he said, the syllables leaving his lips with reluctance, as if he would not let them go. Persephone could hear his mother's mortality in Dionysus' voice then, the huskiness which came from pain rather than the cigarettes, a type of love which denied loss even as it suffered it, a love which flaunted its defiance. Dionysus asked for his mother, his mortal, cinder-reduced mother, who toiled in Hades' domain.

"Give her back to me," Dionysus said, "that is my price."

Persephone was young too, then; she had never yet countermined her husband's will in anything except her own confinement, and she did not know what it would be to intrude such on his domain, to promise away part of his own wealth. But she felt reckless, and desperate with the thought of another season without the sun.

Persephone was a goddess of ways and means. Persephone was a goddess of the tenacity and daring. Persephone smiled her smile that was at once like the first frost and the first flowers, and she told Dionysus, "That won't be a problem."

He smiled back, and his eyebrow curved. "Payment comes upon delivery," he answered her, "so you'll want to hurry it up. I've heard about a nasty little thing called withdrawal."

(Of course, he didn't know about the bottles tucked between silks in her suitcase. He was a young god, after all, and Persephone had quick fingers.)

Her mind ticked, as she sat beside her husband on the train, his arm across her knee in casual possessiveness. She could picture Semele, remember her - the god-touched had a look about them, a spark that even Hadestown didn't drown out. Semele looked like a girl and not a mother, but there was a likeness to her son, something in the slope of their shoulders and the bridge of their noses. But how to get her out?

In a flash, she decided on a direct route. Of a sort.

"My husband," she breathed in his ear, "my lover. Would you give me something?"

He groaned at the closeness of her lips, and pulled her on to his lap. "That depends on what it is. You already have my wealth, wife. You already have my throne."

"I want a party," she told him, "the wedding feast we never had. I want our brothers and sisters to marvel at we have. I want their envy. Will you give that to me?"

She could feel him hesitate, for just an instant, doubt prickling like thistle. He was a private man, her lord, her king - few crossed his walls or his rivers, not even the brothers at whose side he had once fought. But she knew his vanity and his desire. She knew the pride he felt to have her adorned at his side.

He said yes.

She set up a dance floor, and hired a band. She imported the food from above. She sent out invitations to gods and demigods and nymphs, few who had ever been allowed into Hadestown, and all of whom were curious. They came, as she had known they would, stepping off the train and staring with naked fascination at the gemstones like stars above them, the metal creaking beneath their feet. She was a perfect hostess in red and purple silk. She threw the first and best party the underground had ever seen. She danced until her heels were aching, and watched Hades watch her with longing in the set of his brow.

Hermes and Hecate, the only two gods other than herself who regularly took the train journey down, stood at the side of the room and whispered. They suspected something, Persephone could tell, but they did not intervene.

Dionysus arrived late, also as Persephone had anticipated, and began passing out drinks. Persephone heard Aphrodite's delighted laughter. She took from his hand a glass red as pomegranates and winked to him before she brought it to Hades. "Won't you dance with me?" she asked her husband, and put the glass to his lips.

It was at the wildest moment, then, when Hades was drunk on desire and the music blared and no one even thought about stopping, that Persephone led Semele, passive with death, into Dionysus' arms.

"You can't take her by the train," she told him, "he knows who passes there, and it doesn't carry a mortal back out again. You'll have to go by foot. You'll have to run. It isn't easy to defy fate, even for a god."

Dionysus put his hands upon Semele's shoulders, and for a moment he could not look away from her, could not acknowledge Persephone at all, so great was his so-human love. Then he took his mother's hand and looked Persephone in the face. "I know that already," he said, "I've died myself, you know. Thank, you sister."

He kissed her cheek, and whispered to her the secret.

It was morning when Hades realized, and by that time they were long gone, and the kingdom was their own again. She came upon him counting up the souls, as if to verify he had not made a mistake. He looked up, and she knew he had seen her stratagem.

"You've stolen from me," he said.

"I thought that whats yours was mine," she answered, "I thought I was queen here."

He stood, and she was aware of the power running through him, power deep and dark and still alien, even if she had thought she knew it. "I am this land," he told her, "that is what it is to be king. Its losses are my own; I feel them, in my blood and bone. You will not steal from me, queen or no."

Persephone held her ground, though she felt, anew, how frail the plants of the spring were when held again steel and stone. "I will do what I wish," she said, and knew that she had begun something that she could not end, a contest that she could not now back down from without danger.

"We'll see about that," Hades said.

Later, she called the water from the ground, a stream cool as a breeze, clear as glass. She whispered Dionysus' magic into it. "I name you Lethe," she said to the river, "I name you solace. I name you mercy."

She stood back, her dress wet against her skin, and knew herself queen.


End file.
